Nathan Field (of FPA’s Egypt blog) and Ahmed Hamem have a piece in this month’s Arab Reform Bulletin arguing that while there is no guarantee that inviting Islamist parties into politics will make them moderate, the inverse appears to be true. That is, excluding Islamist parties from politics, at least in Egypt, seems to have engendered a more radical strain of political Islam. Of course, those who advocating excluding the Muslim Brotherhood from politics may do so on the grounds that all political Islam presents the potential of radicalization, or is already radical, in which case the evidence that Field and Hamem offer might not be so convincing.
